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Creating Positive Change Quotes and Quotations
 The reality is that changes are coming. ... They must come. You must share in bringing them.  After you've done a thing the same way for two years, look it over carefully. After five years, look at it with suspicion. And after ten years, throw it away and start all over. All that philosophers have done is interpret the world in different ways. It is our job to change it. Christians are supposed not merely to endure change, nor even to profit by it, but to cause it. If you have no will to change it, you have no right to criticize it. Changes are not predictable; but to deny them is to be an accomplice to one's own unnecessary vegetation. We must learn to view change as a natural phenomenon-to anticipate it and to plan for it. The future is ours to channel in the direction we want to go ... we must continually ask ourselves, "What will happen if ... ?" or better still, "How can we make it happen?" One must change one's tactics every ten years if one wishes to maintain one's superiority. New things cannot come where there is no room. The important thing is this: to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become. When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge. One must lose one's life in order to find it. This Mouse must give up one of his Mouse ways of seeing things in order that he may grow. Compromise, if not the spice of life, is its solidity. The only alternative to war is peace and the only road to peace is negotiations. Every one should keep a mental wastepaper basket and the older he grows the more things he will consign to it-torn up to irrecoverable tatters. Unless one says goodbye to what one loves, and unless one travels to completely new territories, one can expect merely a long wearing away of oneself and an eventual extinction. "How does one become a butterfly?" she asked pensively. "You must want to fly so much that you are willing to give up being a caterpillar." No matter how far you have gone on a wrong road, turn back. Duration is not a test of true or false. It is only an error in judgement to make a mistake, but it shows infirmity of character to adhere to it when discovered. If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction. It's never too late-in fiction or in life-to revise. Any path is only a path, and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you. There is a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go. Being stuck is a position few of us like. We want something new but cannot let go of the old-old ideas, beliefs, habits, even thoughts. We are out of contact with our own genius. Sometimes we know we are stuck; sometimes we don't. In both cases we have to do something. My success was not based so much on any great intelligence but on great common sense. Lose yourself wholly; and the more you lose, the more you will find. Heroes take journeys, confront dragons, and discover the treasure of their true selves. Life's challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they're supposed to help you discover who you are. Just as we outgrow a pair of trousers, we outgrow acquaintances, libraries, principles, etc., at times before they're worn out and times-and this is the worst of all-before we have new ones. It is best to learn as we go, not go as we have learned. Those interested in perpetuating present conditions are always in tears about the marvelous past that is about to disappear, without having so much as a smile for the young future. I will not change just to court popularity. Innovation! One cannot be forever innovating. I want to create classics. Have no fear of change as such and, on the other hand, no liking for it merely for its own sake. If you want to stand out, don't be different, be outstanding. The main dangers in this life are the people who want to change everything ... or nothing. To change and to improve are two different things. Our fathers valued change for the sake of its results; we value it in the act. We must beware of needless innovations, especially when guided by logic. All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward. Just because everything is different doesn't mean anything has changed. None are happy but by the anticipation of change. The change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again. We accept the verdict of the past until the need for change cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of further inertia and the irksomeness of action. To some will come a time when change itself is beauty, if not heaven. Today is not yesterday; how can our works and thoughts, if they are always to be the fittest, continue always the same? Change, indeed, is painful, yet ever needful. Security can only be achieved through constant change, through discarding old ideas that have outlived their usefulness and adapting others to current facts. You had better be ready to change your mind when needed. Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul. They were so strong in their beliefs that there came a time when it hardly mattered what exactly those beliefs were; they all fused into a single stubbornness. We are chameleons, and our partialities and prejudices change place with an easy and blessed facility. Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect; they mark our limitations and our bounds. Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries. It often takes more courage to change one's opinion than to stick to it. All our final resolutions are made in a state of mind which is not going to last. It's an ill plan that cannot be changed. The death of dogma is the birth of reality. If anyone accuses me of contradicting myself, I reply: Because I have been wrong once, or oftener, I do not aspire to be always wrong. He who cannot change the very fabric of his thought will never be able to change reality. It is in the uncompromisingness with which dogma is held, and not in the dogma or want of dogma, that the danger lies. I wish to say what I think and feel today, with the proviso that tomorrow perhaps I shall contradict it all. Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. The most significant change in a person's life is a change of attitude. Right attitudes produce right actions. You had better be ready to change your mind when needed, or your mind will change you. The most fatal illusion is the settled point of view. Since life is growth and motion, a fixed point of view kills anybody who has one. The world does not have to change.... The only thing that has to change is our attitude. Oh, would that my mind could let fall its dead ideas, as the tree does its withered leaves! Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying ... that he is wiser today than yesterday. We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood. It is well for people who think to change their minds occasionally in order to keep them clean. For those who do not think, it is best at least to rearrange their prejudices once in a while. New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common. Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes). I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors, and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be new views. Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth. My opinion is a view I hold until... well, until I find something that changes it. He that never changes his opinions, and never corrects his mistakes, will never be wiser on the morrow than he is today. Inconsistency is the only thing in which men are consistent. There is nothing in this world constant but inconstancy. Consistency is only suitable for ridicule. - Moliere The world is quite right. It does not have to be consistent. The world's a scene of changes, and to be constant, in nature, is inconstancy. We cannot remain consistent with the world save by growing inconsistent with our past selves. Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative. The world is quite right. It does not have to be consistent. True consistency, that of the prudent and the wise, is to act in conformity with circumstances, and not to act always the same way under a change of circumstances. Consistency is a paste jewel that only cheap men cherish. Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead. There are those who would misteach us that to stick in a rut is consistency, and a virtue, and that to climb out of the rut is inconsistency, and a vice. Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as for the body. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. ... Speak what you think today in words as hard as cannon balls, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradicts everything you said today. People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be "consistent." To be honest, one must be inconsistent. The only man who can't change his mind is a man who hasn't got one. Like all weak men, he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind. Nothing should be permanent except struggle with the dark side within ourselves. The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinion. A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject. The circumstances of the world are so variable that an irrevocable purpose or opinion is almost synonymous with a foolish one. If in the last few years you haven't discarded a major opinion or acquired a new one, check your pulse. You may be dead. A stiff attitude is one of the phenomena of rigor mortis. Those who never retract their opinions love themselves more than they love truth. It's the most unhappy people who most fear change. Obstinacy and heat in sticking to one's opinions is the surest proof of stupidity. Is there anything so cocksure, so immovable, so disdainful, so contemplative, so solemn and serious as an ass? The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind. When people are least sure, they are often most dogmatic. A conclusion is a place where you got tired of thinking. Only fools and dead men don't change their minds. Fools won't. Dead men can't. The consistent thinker ... is either a walking mummy or else, if he has not succeeded in stifling all his vitality, a fanatical monomaniac. Life is not a static thing. The only people who do not change their minds are incompetents in asylums, and those in cemeteries. To hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years and to take rank, not as a prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well birched and none the wiser. To do things today exactly the way you did them yesterday saves thinking. Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts. Old habits are strong and jealous. Every new adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem. Every new truth begins in a shocking heresy. Birth is violent, whether it be the birth of a child or the birth of an idea. Any truth creates a scandal. Even in slight things the experience of the new is rarely without some stirring of foreboding. Change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better. All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy, for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter into another. The key to change ... is to let go of fear. Tears are sometimes an inappropriate response to death. When a life has been lived completely honestly, completely successfully, or just completely, the correct response to death's perfect punctuation mark is a smile. Since changes are going on anyway, the great thing is to learn enough about them so that we will be able to lay hold of them and turn them in the direction of our desires. Condi-tions and events are neither to be fled from nor passively acquiesced in; they are to be utilized and directed. He that has energy enough to root out a vice should go further, and try to plant a virtue in its place. To change skins, evolve into new cycles, I feel one has to learn to discard. If one changes internally, one should not continue to live with the same objects. They reflect one's mind and psyche of yesterday. I throw away what has no dynamic, living use. Today changes must come fast; and we must adjust our mental habits, so that we can accept comfortably the idea of stopping one thing and beginning another overnight.... We must assume that there is probably a better way to do almost everything. We must stop assuming that a thing which has never been done before probably cannot be done at all. We must therefore take account of this changeable nature of things and of human institutions, and prepare for them with enlightened foresight. You don't have to be afraid of change. You don't have to worry about what's being taken away. Just look to see what's been added. When you're stuck in a spiral, to change all aspects of the spin you need only to change one thing. The first step toward change is acceptance. Once you accept yourself, you open the door to change. That's all you have to do. Change is not something you do, it's something you allow. The more things change, the more they remain the same. Things good in themselves ... perfectly valid in the integrity of their origins, become fetters if they cannot alter. Change lays her hand not upon the truth. The spectacle has changed, but our eyes remain the same. Change is the constant, the signal for rebirth, the egg of the phoenix. Change is what people fear most. Change means the unknown. Nature's mighty law is change. A human being does not cease to exist at death. It is change, not destruction, which takes place. The old order changeth yielding place to new, and God fulfills himself in many ways. The only people in the world who can change things are those who can sell ideas. Everybody thinks of changing humanity and nobody thinks of changing himself. One person's constant is another person's variable. The mill wheel turns, it turns forever, though what is uppermost remains not so. It's a bad plan that can't be changed. In a way, winter is the real spring, the time when the inner things happen, the resurge of nature. Mourning is not forgetting. ... It is an undoing. Every minute tie has to be untied and something permanent and valuable recovered and assimilated from the dust. It is never any good dwelling on goodbyes. It is not the being together that it prolongs, it is the parting. Such is the state of life that none are happy but by the anticipation of change. The change itself is nothing. When we have made it, the next wish is to change again. New links must be forged as old ones rust. The hearts of great men can be changed. - Homer You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are continually flowing on. A man's fortune must first be changed from within. One change always leaves the way open for the establishment of others. There is danger in reckless change; but greater danger in blind conservatism. Without imagination, nothing is dangerous. Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change. The moment of change is the only poem. I have accepted fear as a part of life-specifically the fear of change. ... I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back. ... As we learn we always change, and so our perception. This changed perception then becomes a new Teacher inside each of us. We are restless because of incessant change, but we would be frightened if change were stopped. One must be thrust out of a finished cycle in life, and that leap is the most difficult to make-to part with one's faith, one's love, when one would prefer to renew the faith and recreate the passion. When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us. If you want to make enemies, try to change something. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. 
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